It’s a month later, time for a new Counter Tech column, and I’m still chatting. Some of you have reached out after last month’s column on chatting apps, and I thank you for making me feel a little better by sharing your own addiction to communicating via short, written messages.
By your own comments, we can all concur that the messaging app that seems to be taking a permanent parking spot on our peers’ smartphones is WhatsApp. The magic of WhatsApp is twofold: one part lower-cost and one part higher-functionality — the killer recipe for a true category disruptor. While SMS messaging still remains widely popular, messaging plans cost lots of money. In the USA, an unlimited texting family plan can cost as much as $30 per month, with international per-text rates even higher. The costs are almost punitive when we travel abroad and roam on other carriers networks.
Texters will do anything to save money on their monthly cellular bills, and WhatsApp has become so ubiquitous that many are actually snipping SMS service altogether. This could eventually be a $120 billion per year haircut for carriers that generate that much income on SMS charges.
The days when many smartphone users won’t have SMS on their phone are coming. From a functionality point of view, WhatsApp is like the Swiss Army knife of communication. It opens up the opportunity to communicate with others beyond just text. Within the same chatting screen, you can use the app to share pictures, videos, geo-locations on a map, hyperlinks and voice messages; all of this while using a higher level of encryption. Actually, for Android users, the app just upgraded to “end-to-end” encryption, virtually guaranteeing that no one can read users’ messages or eavesdrop on them along the way.
The upgrade is already available to hundreds of millions of users, and soon more will join the protected ranks when the update rolls out to IOS phones. Another way WhatsApp seems to outshine SMS, particularity on iOS phones, is group chats. Creating a group within the app is very easy, and you can even customize the group by adding a group photo or logo so that users can easily relate. Today, I actively chat with four different groups composed of family, friends and customers.
The group chat feature lets you connect with up to 100 people at once. Groups need to be created by one person who becomes the administrator, and then invites other to join. Members can always control their participation in group chats by staying in or leaving the group as they wish. These groups become like forums, where members can share information and all be informed at the same time. It’s just great to garner our ideas, questions and concerns and share them collectively to stay in touch, almost like a hive. One of the groups that I enjoy the most was created by several of my cousins after a recent family wedding.
Cousins from all over Spain, the Dominican Republic and the States came to Puerto Rico for the great event. One of the cousins created a group so we can all share our wedding pictures; however, long after the wedding we all remained in contact, almost daily. As a matter of fact, I have never been as close to them as I am now that I’m able to share a picture or a quick message with all of them in a flash, from my phone, anywhere, and for free. But it is not all fun and games; the group chat phenomenon has entered our company in a big way, and we use it to communicate with customers daily. On WhatsApp we have a group with more than 20 members, all of them affiliates of our Parts Plus National Program Group.
The customers themselves asked us to create the group as an alternative to the many email communications we were sharing with them. They felt messaging was way more immediate.
Soon, our own employees and support staff from Parts Plus joined the group, and today it has become the defacto forum for all program business issues; plus, we all get to share a joke or two along the way. Now, every member is as informed as the next guy. Members are taking the lead and sharing best business practices, as well as marketing and merchandising ideas. Any question posted by a member gets an almost immediate response curated by the crowd. It’s also an extremely efficient way to locate parts within the group: a veritable Swiss Army knife of communication to keep the group slashing ahead of the pack.
